EMI Shielding & RF Components Manufacturing

Our board-level EMI shields provide electromagnetic containment and immunity for sensitive electronic circuits. A shield can does two jobs at once: it keeps a noisy section (a switching regulator, a clock, an RF front-end) from radiating into neighboring circuits, and it protects sensitive analog or receive paths from external fields. Cans are available in one-piece and two-piece configurations, stamped and formed for reliable PCB mounting and repeatable assembly.

A point engineers often miss: at RF, the metal wall is almost never the limit. Currents ride in the first few skin depths of the surface, and at 1 GHz the skin depth in copper is roughly 2 µm — so a typical 0.10–0.20 mm nickel-silver wall is already thousands of skin depths thick and reflection-dominated shielding well above 100 dB is intrinsic. Real cans land around 40–80 dB because of apertures and seams, not the material. That is why footprint, grounding continuity, and lid contact pitch matter far more than wall thickness once you are above a few MHz.

The first design decision is rework access, because it drives the whole part:

• One-piece can — a single stamped enclosure soldered to the ground perimeter. Lowest part count and cost; must be desoldered (usually scrapped) to reach the components under it. Best for frozen, high-volume designs.
• Two-piece frame + lid — a soldered frame plus a removable stamped lid retained by spring fingers. Allows probing, tuning, and component replacement without desoldering. Higher piece price, lower total cost where rework is expected.
• SMT fence + cover — a pick-and-place fence reflow-soldered like any SMT part, with a snap-on cover. Suits SMT-only lines and fast changeover.
• Multi-cavity — one frame with internal walls that isolate RF from digital sections, killing cavity-to-cavity coupling while saving board area.

Common base materials are nickel silver (the workhorse — stamps and solders cleanly, corrosion resistant), tin-plated steel, stainless steel, and copper alloys; high-permeability mu-metal is reserved for low-frequency magnetic fields, below roughly 100 kHz, where reflection is weak and you need absorption. Footprint, wall, and any aperture pattern are all tooling decisions, so they are fixed early. Every can is designed for automated pick-and-place with solderable tabs or a continuous wall and defined keep-outs.

Proper grounding is critical for EMI shield effectiveness — a shield is only as good as its ground. Our RF clips and grounding contacts provide low-impedance electrical connections between shield covers and PCB ground planes, maintained by controlled spring force so the contact stays low-resistance over thermal cycling and vibration.

The mechanism is simple and unforgiving: any break in the conductive perimeter behaves like a slot antenna, and a slot leaks based on its longest linear dimension, not its area. A first-order estimate for a slot of length L is SE (dB) = 20 · log10(λ / 2L) while L stays under λ/2. The practical design rule that follows is to keep grounding-via spacing and lid-finger pitch under λ/20 at your highest frequency of concern. At 6 GHz the free-space wavelength is 50 mm, so λ/20 is 2.5 mm — finger and via pitch closer than that, perimeter contact looser than that starts to leak. This is why a continuous ground ring under the footprint, stitched with closely spaced vias, matters as much as the can itself.

Applications include:

• Spring finger contacts for removable shield covers — formed from spring-temper alloy (beryllium copper, phosphor bronze, or nickel silver) to hold normal force through many open/close cycles
• Board-to-shield frame grounding clips that establish the perimeter ground connection
• Gasket and compression contacts for EMI sealing across mating seams
• Multi-point grounding configurations that shorten the spacing between contacts to raise the effective top frequency

Automotive electronics face demanding EMI requirements driven by regulatory standards, safety systems, and high-density integration. Component-level emissions and immunity are typically qualified against CISPR 25, which spans roughly 150 kHz to 2.5 GHz — a band wide enough to catch both the conducted switching harmonics of DC-DC converters and the radiated coupling between the dozens of ECUs packed into a modern harness. Shields and grounding contacts have to hold that performance across the automotive thermal range (commonly −40 °C to +125 °C) and sustained vibration, which is exactly where contact normal force and corrosion resistance earn their keep. Our automotive-grade EMI components are produced under an IATF 16949 quality system with full traceability, supporting long-term supply-chain stability.

Learn more about automotive applications →

We work with OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers to develop custom EMI shielding solutions tailored to specific board layouts, performance requirements, and manufacturing constraints.

Our Korea R&D team provides engineering support including:

• Design-for-manufacturing consultation
• Tooling development and validation
• Prototype and sample production
• Transition to high-volume manufacturing

Explore our manufacturing capabilities →